"I'm not talking of any delightful girl but you!" he broke in with a voice that, as he afterwards learned, struck Mrs. Rooth's ears in the garden with affright. "I simply hold you, under pain of being convicted of the grossest prevarication, to the strict sense of what you said ten minutes ago."
"Ah I've said so many things! One has to do that to get rid of you. You rather hurt my hand," she added—and jerked it away in a manner showing that if she was an angel of mercy her mercy was partly for herself.
"As I understand you, then, I may have some hope if I do renounce my profession?" Peter pursued. "If I break with everything, my prospects, my studies, my training, my emoluments, my past and my future, the service of my country and the ambition of my life, and engage to take up instead the business of watching your interests so far as I may learn how and ministering to your triumphs so far as may in me lie—if after further reflexion I decide to go through these preliminaries, have I your word that I may definitely look to you to reward me with your precious hand?"
"I don't think you've any right to put the question to me now," she returned with a promptitude partly produced perhaps by the clear-cut form his solemn speech had given—there was a charm in the sound of it—to each item of his enumeration. "The case is so very contingent, so dependent on what you ingeniously call your further reflexion. While you really reserve everything you ask me to commit myself. If it's a question of further reflexion why did you drag me up here? And then," she added, "I'm so far from wishing you to take any such monstrous step."
"Monstrous you call it? Just now you said it would be sublime."
"Sublime if it's done with spontaneity, with passion; ridiculous if it's done 'after further reflexion.' As you said, perfectly, a while ago, it isn't a thing to reason about."
"Ah what a help you'd be to me in diplomacy!" Peter yearningly cried. "Will you give me a year to consider?"
"Would you trust me for a year?"
"Why not, if I'm ready to trust you for life?"
"Oh I shouldn't be free then, worse luck. And how much you seem to take for granted one must like you!"